• Most notable changes since January: Wu Wei up 32, Titan up 29, Spectrum up 28, Elegant Grunge up 22, Beach up 15, Structure up 14, Fusion up 13, Bueno up 10.

• MLB themes: not included in the Theme Showcase site or the stats system.

• Duster, Prologue, The Journalist v1.3 and the three older versions of Sandbox: included in the stats system but hidden. Apparently WP wants to remove them or at least not continue to update them.

• As for poor Kubrick,
Dec 19, 2010: “4,394,186 blogs use the Kubrick theme”, “our most popular theme”.
June 29, 2011: “162,716 blogs use the Kubrick theme”, “our 20th most popular theme”.
July 2, 2011: “596,686 blogs use the Kubrick theme”, “our 3rd most popular theme”.
July 4, 2011: “885,926 blogs use the Kubrick theme”, “our 3rd most popular theme”.
July 5, 2011: “1,031,379 blogs use the Kubrick theme”, “our 3rd most popular theme”.
Kubrick users collectively insane? No, just WP playing foolish games… As mentioned in my January 2011 post, Kubrick was the default theme for several years, so there were millions of blogs using it. For some reason, WP doesn’t want this to show. At some point they even hid the theme from the Theme Showcase site. Check the site to see their latest invention: if you click to view the themes by popularity, you’ll see Twenty Ten first, immediately followed by Kubrick; but if you click to view the details for Kubrick, you’ll see it listed as the third most popular theme (and all other themes ranking one position lower than in my tables). What’s the phantom second theme? None: just the new way they concocted to hide the rest of the Kubrick blogs.Update!
July 6, 2011: “1,031,379 blogs use the Kubrick theme”, “our 2nd most popular theme”.
Maybe they read my post…Update 2
Take note of Lance’s replies re this in the comments.Update 3 (March 7, 2013)
After Lance’s replies, I thought I was wrong and unfair. Well, today I saw the following in the Theme Showcase site:
“6,587,146 blogs use the Twenty Ten theme” – “Our most popular theme!”
“2,331,398 blogs use the Twenty Eleven theme” – “Our 2nd most popular theme”. [etc etc]
“208,285 blogs use the Mystique theme” – “Our 35th most popular theme”. [etc]
“4,268,813 blogs use the Kubrick theme” – “Our 38th most popular theme”.
For another WP game, see my post Stats, wordpress way.

I will gladly apologize, and say so in the post, if I’m wrong (and I would really like to be wrong in this case). But the fact that you once hid Kubrick from the Theme Showcase and the trick with the non-existent “2nd” theme don’t help. Some older forum replies (such as: we removed Cutline because it was four years old etc.) don’t help either. So for the moment my harsh remark stays, your response is most welcome, and the very few people who will be interested in this can decide for themselves.

By the way, I also find it very strange that you’re hiding Duster, Prologue, Journalist 1.3 and the older Sandbox themes. They are active themes, so if I were you I would naturally include them in the Theme Showcase – I would simply add a note saying that the theme is no longer available to newly created blogs.

No apology needed, Panos. I think it’s really cool that you pay attention to these details.

the trick with the non-existent “2nd” theme don’t help

There’s no trick. What happened is we had two Kubricks: the old one named “default” based on the fact it used to be the WP default theme and one called “kubrick”. What we’re doing right now is combining the theme stats and merging the themes so that #2 and #3 will become just “kubrick”. That process is happening behind the scenes right now, so you’ll see the stats for Kubrick keep rising until all the blogs are processed.

As for the other themes you mentioned, we retired them because they’ve been replaced with a newer version.

They aren’t on the Theme Showcase because we’d like WP.com bloggers to use the latest version of our themes. The Showcase isn’t intended to be an accurate historical archive, its intention is, in fact, to showcase the best of the themes available on WP.com.

You’re kind of like a WordPress watchdog. Like that idea. Glad WordPress engages in conversation with you, and you with them. Very civil, and very helpful for non-Geeks like me who can always use some help, and can’t always figure my way around WordPress support. And they definitely aren’t available to hand-hold the millions of WordPress bloggers that there are. So thank you, Panos, for being our Don Quixote…champion of the underdogs.

Yes of course we engage in conversation with WP staff (occasionally also conversation you don’t see): WP is generally very friendly, I’m one of the experienced forum volunteers, and I know that Lance and the rest of the WP theme team appreciate my theme surveys too.

I’m not sure what’s going on with Kubrick, but if by shafting you mean deleting, that’s highly unlikely: they’ve only removed two themes, for very peculiar reasons (I don’t know if you’re familiar with the story).

Since the widgets of my blog Putignanonelmirino
had become a lot Yesterday I went from theme MistyLook to theme Coraline.
I tried Pilcrow, but I dismissed because the menu and the header may not contain the subtitle.
With Misty Look theme I inserted a background image by entering this code (you wrote you in this blog or forum WordPress.com) in a text widget.

a) You don’t need such code workarounds in Coraline: you go to Appearance>Background and upload the image.

b) But no, you can’t change the transparency.

c) You have seriously overdone it with your widgets: your blog takes too long to load – for people with a slow connection it may be impossible to load. At least limit the number of posts per page to only a few.

I tried to go on the dashboard. The image is loaded, but the pages remain transparent even if you set the color white.
Give up the background image.
Regarding the number of widgets … in the coming days I’ll do a little cleaning.
Sincerely.
Franco.

“The image is loaded, but the pages remain transparent even if you set the color white.”
Yes, because the bg color isn’t an additional function: bg color and bg image are just alternatives, loaded the same way.

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Announcement 22/03/2012:
After WP's latest move, this blog will no longer offer active support and assistance. The blog will remain online but commenting on older posts has been disabled.
✶ All theme-related posts are updated up to and including theme 189 in this list, but will not continue to be updated.

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Mostly on themes, formatting, coding, tweaks and workarounds.
Based on or springing from my contributing in the wp.com forum.